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Sensation and Perception: Powerpoint® Presentation
Sensation and Perception: Powerpoint® Presentation
Sensation and
Perception
PowerPoint®
presentation
by Jim Foley
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© 2013 Worth Publishers
Sensation vs. Perception
Sensation Perception
“The process by which our “The process of organizing
sensory receptors and nervous and interpreting sensory
system receive and represent
stimulus energies from our information, enabling us
environment.” to recognize meaningful
objects and events.”
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Making sense of the world
Top-down
What am I processing:
seeing? using models,
ideas, and
expectations to
interpret sensory
information
Bottom-up
processing:
taking sensory
information and Is that
then assembling something I’ve
and integrating it seen before?
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Do you see a
painting or a 3D
bottle?
What’s on the
bottle?
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Top-down
Processing
You may start
to see
something in
this picture if
we give your
brain some
concepts to
apply:
“tree”
“sidewalk”
“dog”
“Dalmatian”
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From Sensory Organs to the Brain
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Thresholds
The absolute threshold refers
to the minimum level of
stimulus intensity needed to
detect a stimulus half the time.
Anything below
this threshold
is considered
“subliminal.”
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Subliminal Detection
Subliminal:
below our threshold for
being able to consciously
detect a stimulus
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When Absolute
Thresholds are not
Absolute
Signal detection theory refers to whether or not we
detect a stimulus, especially amidst background noise.
This depends not just on intensity of the stimulus but on
psychological factors such as the person’s experience,
expectations, motivations, and alertness.
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Sensory Adaptation
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Perceptual Set
Perceptual set is what we expect to see, which influences what we
do see. Perceptual set is an example of top-down processing .
Ambiguous
The
Visible
Spectrum We encounter waves of electromagnetic
radiation.
Our eyes respond to some of these waves.
Our brain turns these energy wave
sensations into colors.
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Color/Hue and
Brightness
We perceive the
wavelength/frequency of
the electromagnetic
waves as color, or hue.
We perceive the
height/amplitude of
these waves as
intensity, or
brightness.
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The Eye
Light from the candle passes through the cornea and the
pupil, and gets focused and inverted by the lens. The
light then lands on the retina, where it begins the
process of transduction into neural impulses to be sent
out through the optic nerve.
The lens is not rigid; it can perform accommodation by
changing shape to focus on near or far objects. 18
Turning Neural Signals into Images
Some ganglion cells in the eye send signals directly to
the visual cortex in response to certain features such
as visual patterns, certain edges, lines, or movements.
In and around the visual cortex of the occipital lobe,
supercells integrate these feature signals to recognize
more complex forms such as faces.
Faces
Houses
Chairs
Houses and Chairs
SUPERCELLS
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Color Vision
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Color Blindness
People missing red cones or green
cones have trouble differentiating red
from green, and thus have trouble
reading the numbers to the right.
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Opponent-Process Theory Test
The dot, the dot, keep staring at the dot in the center…
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Turning light waves into mental images/movies...
Perceptual Organization
We have perceptual processes for enabling us to
organize perceived colors and lines into objects:
grouping incomplete parts into gestalt wholes
seeing figures standing out against background
perceiving form, motion, and depth
keeping a sense of shape and color constancy despite
changes in visual information
using experience to guide visual interpretation
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Our senses take in the blue
information on the right.
The Role of
However, our perceptual
processes turn this into: Perception
1.a white paper with blue
circle dots, with a cube
floating in front.
2.a white paper with blue
circle holes, through which
you can see a cube.
3.a cube sticking out to the
top left, or bottom right.
4.blue dots (what cube?)
with angled lines inside.
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Figure-Ground Perception
In most visual scenes, we pick out objects and figures,
standing out against a background.
Some art muddles this ability by giving us two equal
choices about what is figure and what is “ground”:
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Visual Cliff: A Test of Depth Perception
Babies seem to develop this ability at crawling age.
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Monocular Cue:
Relative Size
We intuitively know to
interpret familiar objects (of
known size) as farther away
when they appear smaller.
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Monocular Cues:
Linear Perspective and
Interposition
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Tricks Using
Linear
Perspective
These two
red lines
meet the
retina as
being the
same size
However,
our
perception of
distance
affects our
perception of
length.
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Monocular Cues: Shading Effects
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Monocular Cues: Relative Motion
A picture of a moon on
a sign would zip behind
us, but the actual moon
is too far for us to pass.
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Perceptual Constancy
Our ability to see objects as appearing the same
even under different lighting conditions, at
different distances and angles, is called
perceptual constancy. Perceptual constancy is a
top-down process.
Examples:
color and brightness constancy
shape and size constancy
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Color Constancy
This ability to see a consistent
color in changing illumination
helps us see the three sides as all
being yellow, because our brain
compensates for shading.
As a result, we interpret three
same-color blue dots, with shades
that are not adjusted for shading,
as being of three different colors.
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Brightness Constancy
On this screen, squares A and B are
exactly the same shade of gray.
You can see this when you connect
them.
So why does B look lighter?
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Shape Constancy
Shape constancy refers to the ability to perceive objects as
having a constant shape despite receiving different sensory
images. This helps us see the door as a rectangle as it
opens. Because of this, we may think the red shapes on
screen are also rectangles.
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The Moon Illusion
The moon appears
larger on the
horizon than
overhead.
Why do we perceive the moon as
a different size depending on its
location?
One possible theory is that our
ancestors assumed overhead
objects were closer than objects
on the horizon.
The moon, like one of these
monsters, seems larger because
we see it as farther away.
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Size Constancy
We have an ability to use distance-related context
cues to help us see objects as the same size even if
the image on the retina becomes smaller.
The Ames room was invented by American
ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1934.
The Ames room was designed to manipulate
distance cues to make two same-sized girls appear
very different in size.
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Hearing/Audition: Starting with Sound
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Sound Waves Reach The Ear
The outer ear In the middle ear, the sound waves hit
collects sound the eardrum and move the hammer,
and funnels it anvil, and stirrup in ways that amplify
to the eardrum. the vibrations. The stirrup then sends
these vibrations to the oval window of
the cochlea.
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Sound Perception: Loudness
Loudness refers to
more intense sound
vibrations. This causes
a greater number of
hair cells to send
signals to the brain.
Soft sounds only
activate certain hair
cells; louder sounds
move those hair cells
AND their neighbors.
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Sound Perception: Pitch
How does the inner ear turn sound
frequency into neural frequency?
Frequency theory
Place theory At low sound frequencies, hair
At high sound frequencies, cells send signals at whatever
signals are generated at rate the sound is received.
different locations in the
cochlea, depending on pitch.
The brain reads pitch by Volley Principle
reading the location where the At ultra high frequencies,
signals are coming from. receptor cells fire in succession,
combing signals to reach higher
firing rates. 45
Taste
Our tongues have
receptors for five different
types of tastes, each of Bitter:
which may have had potential
survival functions. poisons
Sweet:
energy source
Umami:
(savoriness)
proteins to grow
and repair Salty: sodium
tissue essential to
physiological
Sour: processes
potentially toxic
acid
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Neurochemistry of Taste
There are no regions of the tongue,
just different types of taste
receptor cells projecting hairs into
each taste bud’s pore.
These cells are easily triggered to
send messages to the temporal
lobe of the brain.
Burn your tongue? Receptors
reproduce every week or two. But
with age, taste buds become less
numerous and less sensitive.
Top-down processes still can
override the neurochemistry;
expectations do influence taste.
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Mixing the different senses together
Sensory interaction occurs when
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different senses influence each other.
For example:
a burst of sound makes a dim light
source more visible.
flavor is an experience not only of taste,
but also of smell and texture.
Synaesthesia is a condition
seeing text or lip movement, or even
feeling the puff of air from consonants, when perception in one
affects what words we hear. sense is triggered by a
sensation in a DIFFERENT
sense.
Some people experience
synaesthesia all the time,
reporting that, “the number
7 gives me a salty taste” or
“rock music seems purple.” 48
Sensing Body Position and
Movement
Kinesthesis (“movement
feeling”) refers to sensing
the movement and position
of individual body parts
relative to each other.
How it works: sensors in the
joints and muscles send
signals that coordinate with
signals from the skin, eyes,
and ears
Without kinesthesis, we
would need to watch our
limbs constantly to
coordinate movement.
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Sensing Body Position and
Movement
Vestibular sense refers to the ability to
sense the position of the head and
body relative to gravity, including the
sense of balance.
How it works: fluid-filled chambers in
the inner ear (vestibular sacs and
semicircular canals) have hairlike
receptors that send messages about
the head’s position to the cerebellum
Vestibular sense serves as the human
gyroscope, helping us to balance and
stay upright.
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